This article has a good description of the strength of encryption – if encryption is a safe, then each bit doubles the thickness of the safe door. Read on –
“Originally we proposed that the encryption key length should be 128 bit,”
“Audestad says that the British were not very interested in having a strong encryption. And after a few years, they protested against the high security level that was proposed.
– They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised. The West Germans protested because they wanted a stronger encryption to prevent spying from East Germany. The compromise was a key length of 64 bit – where the ten last bits were set to zero. The result was an effective key length of 54 bit.”
“The British argued that the key length had to be reduced. Among other things they wanted to make sure that a specified Asian country should not have the opportunity to escape surveillance.”
“One other thing that was put in the GSM specification, after demands from some countries, was that the encryption could be turned off, without the cell phone user knowing.”
These are flaws that have been intentionally built into our mobile communications infrastructure. While it appears that it was initially for the purposes of international espionage, it is worth noting that this was put in place with no consideration of its affects on the general public’s privacy.
This is a symptom of how power views the body politic – specifically that their privacy and security are at best secondary to the higher-level projects that are directed outward across borders, and at worst a useful illusion that is used to control, either by portraying power as benevolent and respectable (by allowing semi-effective encryption in the first place), or by creating a false sense of (functionally non-existent) security that, when “broken” (via a media event like a terrorist attack or foreign espionage), provokes emotional responses that leave public opinion open to manipulation.
Both of these actions are designed inversions, making the public feel as though they have power of their own when they are in fact utterly powerless. This is a powerful distraction that, if believed by the majority, causes wider public opinion to deem actual exercises of power (demonstrations, occupations, civil disobedience) unnecessary, frivolous, or criminal; thus the population is disconnected from the most important tools at their disposal as citizens, allowing them to be worked like factory machines while on the job and monitored like cattle when they are not.
So what is to be done now? The most important thing is to disabuse those around us of the notion that any of us have access to any serious power – this will make them aware of the power void that exists in their lives, and make them more receptive to the idea of direct action for righteous causes. From there, it is an easy next step to point out that those with power obviously have no regard for the lives of those without – unnecessary wars, stagnation of wages, and corporate exceptionalism are all rather direct examples of this.
This is political discussion, but it is also akin to deprogramming. Mass media has been distracting our attention and manufacturing our beliefs for a long time. It will take far more than one or ten to bring the change that it needed.
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Sources-We-were-pressured-to-weaken-the-mobile-security-in-the-80s-7413285.html
WATCH 4-D CHESS 